Southern Home (SH): Denise, you seem to be a quintessential Texas story. You’re designing or installing a stylish house one day and working in the cattle stalls of your ranch the next.
That’s true! Working with animals is the best stress relief. I grew up on 350 acres in central Texas, and my grandmother had 200 head of cattle. When I moved to Dallas after college, I didn’t think I’d ever go back to a small-town way of life, where you know everyone and everyone knows your business. But my daughter is the one that really made a lot of this happen. She’s so much like my grandmother, even though they never met. In high school, she showed cattle through the National FFA Organization, and she didn’t want to give up her heifer when she left for college. My husband and I decided we were going to have to figure this out, and we ended up buying an old dairy farm on 20 acres an hour from Dallas.
